m.sawyer photography

film: scanning observations and tips

Well, the future is now. And I’ve invested in a scanner. I decided to go with the Epson V500. After a lot of research (and after not having much cash to spend), I figured the differences between the V500 and V700/V750 were not worth the money at this point. I would say that I’m dreaming of one day getting a Nikon 8000 or 9000. However, by the time I can afford one of those, I think either A) medium format backs may actually be within reach, or B) the quality of upper-end full-frame DSLRs may punch through the dynamic range barrier that medium format digital kits currently transcend.

As of now I’ve scanned around 7 or 8 rolls of 120. And I see what everyone was talking about when they mentioned a scanning “learning curve”. So without further rambling, here’s a nice little list of what I’ve learned:

Hardware:

• Can’t speak for 35mm film, but for 120, you might as well throw away the film holder that comes with the scanner and get one of Doug Fisher’s Better Scanning holders with the glass insert. Without one, you’ll invariably experience 1 or 2 major problems: newton rings, and out-of-focus scans.
• The Epson V500 is rated at 6400 dpi. For all practical purposes, this number is meaningless. Kinda reminds me of the annoying and useless feature called “digital zoom” on most point-and-shoot digital cameras. The V500, from my not-so-scientific testing, seems to me to have a maximum resolution of around 2000 dpi. This would yield a decent 5x7” print from a 35mm shot, or about a 12x18” print from a 6x7cm shot. Not too shabby. But this depends on whether your scanning and post-processing technique is adequate, and ultimately on how sharp the negative/positive is in the first place.

Software:

• Forget about the software that comes with your scanner. Get Vuescan Pro. It gives you just about every feature you could want in a scanner: multi-pass, multi-exposure, raw scanning, DNG files, 48-bit, and more. Silverfast AI is too expensive. Silverfast SE is possibly the most laughably horrible software I’ve ever seen. EpsonScan isn’t bad, and actually it’s probably the easiest to use. But it doesn’t give you enough control. The only thing that drives me crazy about Vuescan is that its multi/auto cropping tool is amazingly bad. But since I’m not scanning a zillion frames at once, I can live with it.

Film:

• The new Ektar 100 is awesome! My style in digital photography lately had been shying away from any vivid colors, prefering an aged, desaturated look. But seeing the poignant colors come up on the screen from the Ektar made me revisit my thinking here. Not that I’ll abandon the desaturated look though.
• Using old, cheap, expired film has its drawbacks. The quality from edge to edge of the frame is unpredictable. Sometimes this gives a nice pastel washy effect, but sometimes it looks dingy and unintentionally dirty (not in a cool way, in my opinion). The Fuji Superia 400 I used was also somewhat crinkly and difficult to work with in the scanner.
• Fuji Neopan 400 is an awesome film to scan (and great for home darkroom processing, so I’ve heard). It lies very flat, has moderate, pleasant grain (in 6x7 anyway), is pretty sharp, and has just beautiful tonality. The histograms show a nice soft falloff, making the digital files extremely easy to work with in Lightroom. I was able to overexpose it by several stops to retain all the shadow detail and I almost never lost any of the highlight detail. Highly recommended.

Technique:

• If you’re going to do much beyond just posting the images to the web, take the time to learn how to sharpen your files well. This doesn’t just apply to the digital processing of film photos, it also applies to digital photography (albeit less importantly). Files straight out of the scanner are going to be pretty soft. Here is a great tutorial about sharpening in Lightroom: here and here. Here is a great post about 3-step sharpening in Photoshop.
• The dynamic range and tonality of film are a lot of the reason why I love it so much. I was pleasantly surprised that my V500 was able to capture this decently well. Of course this was after painstakingly perusing Vuescan’s features, doing lots of tweaking. I think there are two reasons why I was able to capture great tonality and range: 1) scanning in 48-bit mode, and 2) using the multi-exposure feature of Vuescan. This produces giant files but I don’t mind. The quality is totally worth it to me.
• Vuescan totally confounded me at first. It was producing crazy, useless, color-shifted images until I found out how to get the proper settings and calibrate it for the particular film:

1. 1. Load the film up in the scanner and hit Preview.
   2. Drag a selection window over a strip of film that is blank, in the margins of the film.
   3. Hit Calibrate.
   4. Preview again.
   5. Check the box for “Lock Exposure”.
   6. Preview again.
   7. Check the box for “Lock Film Base Color”.
   8. Turn off any color correction that may be applied automatically by Vuescan. You’re probably better server by adjusting these things in Photoshop, not Vuescan.
   9. In the output section, make sure you’re Saving “As Film”.
   10. Hit Scan and you’re on your way.

That’s all for how.

film: processing/scanning results

After many games of ping-pong in my head about where/how to get my 6x7 negatives processed, I finally decided to bite the bullet and take a few rolls (not all, because it’s so darn expensive) to my nearest pro lab, Apertures Photo. I had them processed and scanned to a CD. It was something like $5/roll for processing, $5/roll for scanning, and $6 for the CD itself. The images produced by their Noritsu lab were about 5MP, 8-bit jpegs. Not the greatest quality or even usable for anything other than proofing or posting on the web, but I guess this is the digital counterpart to the old light table. The images actually looked decent though they were a little noisy and couldn’t be manipulated much on a computer. I was quite happy with most of the black and white shots (Fuji Neopan 400). Great tonality, range, and sharpness, but noticeably grainy. The color shots were all expired Fuji Superia 400, a cheap consumerr-quality film that had been sitting in my freezer for a couple of years. I was not terribly impressed with the color of the Superia or anything else about it for that matter, except that it seemed to have adequate sharpness (and that was shooting wide-open, handheld).

Well I decided I really like two of the shots I’d had processed so far, so I took them a step further. I brought those two negatives back to Apertures for a 4000 DPI scan on their Nikon 8000 film scanner. The files produced here were just enormous: 270 MB TIFF files, approximately 85 MP. My little Macbook had trouble opening each of them in Lightroom, lots of spinning pinwheels happening that day. The resolution on these files was obviously supreme, but I think a bit overstated by the technical specs of the files. I think the real resolution was probably somewhere around half of the stated 4000 DPI. And the other problem is that I’m still getting 8-bit files. So far my opinion on film scanning: why would you give up the dynamic range of the film by compressing bit-depth like that? I’d like to have a 16-bit file that’s about 2400 DPI. That would be perfect I should think. Now if I can find a lab that’ll accomodate without costing me an arm and a leg.

Click here to see some of the results (as well as old film shots).